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Feedback: September 2004, Published: October 2004
I have not published the feedback column for six months. Here are two of the items that I started to format for the feedback column. My apologies for the other unanswered mail. From now on I will try to lift my game There were several emails about Robots. Unfortunately the Robot tracking script is in a serious state of neglect at present. I will try to do some work on it soon.Feedback:
Message from John Titornot
From: John Titornot Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 09:30:40 +1100 (EST) Dear Webmaster, -- Message Follows -- Fellow Developers, I found your site on Google and went to view your list of Browsers by Popularity (http://www.pgts.com.au/nocrawl/pgtsj0212c.html)... The list took a really long time to build and I have a P4_1.6 1G_RAM... So to make a long story short, I thought I'd just let you guys know that if you add the COL field to your loooooooooong tables then the tables can populate as they download, which looks a lot better than nothing for a minute then BAM!! a huge list. Make... <table border=0 border-style="solid" frame="box" cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0> <!-- browser_list --> Into... <table cols="###NUMBER_OF_COLUMNS####" border=0 border-style="solid" frame="box" cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0> <!-- browser_list --> Cheers! -- Message Ends -- From: 24.20.130.196 Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Re: Message from Al Gordon
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 13:02:41 +1000 From: Gerry Patterson G'day Gordon, What this seems to be doing is using a perl script on your server which is in the file $DOC_ROOT/cgi-bin/wwwboard.pl (where $DOC_ROOT is your document root for apache -- assuming that you don't have aliases). I suggest you review this file and see what it is they are doing. It is probably a form mail script. Regards, Gerry Patterson On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 12:21:48PM +1000, a.t.gordon@islet.org wrote: > Dear Webmaster, > > -- Message Follows -- > Your site taught me a lot about User-Agent strings. Now I understand the convoluted history that led to the current mess. Thank you. > > I am operating a public message forum, and naturally I get some spam being posted. I am blocking 99% of it, but I have a question about the latest attack (which I managed to block, but I still don't understand the basic attack mechanism). > > All of the attacks are coming from the following User-Agent: > 212.21.228.22 - - [20/May/2004:01:35:14 -0400] "POST /cgi-bin/wwwboard.pl HTTP/1.0" 403 308 "http://www.islet.org/forum/messages/31401.htm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt; AIRF)". There are lots of different IP addresses, so likely an anonymous proxy is being used by the spammer. > > My question is: What is AIRF? I am now blocking it in httpd.conf and the attacks have stopped, but am I blocking any legitimate visitors who may be using such a User-Agent? > > Any help would be appreciated. > > Thanks, > Al > > > -- Message Ends -- > From: 64.231.138.178 > Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461; YComp 5.0.0.0)